The Trickster Tale in Botswana: Does Gender Determine Levels of Violence?

Summary

This article examines the figure of the androgynous trickster and how this concept can help empower both the male and female listener of oral narratives. It focuses on various scenarios in which the trickster is presented, to suggest that it is the androgynous nature, for example, of Hare that makes the character avoid abuse or violence. Tales that have the trickster as male, with a wife, are examined to show how it is the androgyny rather than the outward appearance that guarantees success. Seeing the trickster as male is misleading. This analysis considers issues such as how characters and storytellers use language, power, size and space to present a convenient image of the trickster as male when indeed this should not be the case.

Michael Carroll (1984) states that ‘The term trickster was first introduced in connection with the study of North American Indian mythology and the North American trickster is not at all a clever hero’ (106). Carroll's observation is that this trickster was obsessed with a need to indulge in food and sex and its attempts to satisfy its cravings tended to backfire spectacularly. This image of the trickster is very different from that found in Botswana. Mischief and buffoonery define the character of Mmutla (in Setswana) or Shulo (in Ikalanga). The humour in these tales are more pronounced. It is this laughter that numbs or distracts the child listener from the manner in which the characters interact, albeit at times violently. Carroll acknowledges that the definition of the trickster is broad, primarily because the androgynous trickster does not only appear in one particular place or in certain situations. This is quite a dynamic character, so that categorizing it simply as an object of buffoonery is inadequate and misleading.

Equally inadequate and misleading is to conclude that because the trickster is dynamic it is therefore male. Such gendering of the trickster needs to be explained because it has ramifications on how gender-based violence is viewed and interpreted by the listener. If the trickster tale promotes such violence, then the sex of the animals needs to be catalogued and analysed, because such narratives, though humorous, reflect real-life interactions and situations.